[00:00:00] Speaker A: People say, oh, it's impossible and illogical to make any inference to the possibility of agency in the development of living things, design in the evidence of living things. But we make inferences like that all the time.
The forensic pathologist has decide whether the body found at the side of the road was struck by a car, was shot with a gun, or whether the guy just died spontaneously and he's going to look at the evidence. I see a bullet hole here. It looks like somebody shot him. That's agency. That's design. In another sense of the term, somebody designed his death.
The archaeologist, when he digs up something from the ancient ruin, he has to decide, gee, it's kind of funny shape. It's all eroded, it's crumbled. Is this an artifact or is it just a rock? And he has to look at the evidence and he believes he can make an inference.
Why should we somehow put living things and origins off limits to those kinds of arguments and questions and inquiries?
I think it's arbitrary, and I don't think that we should allow ourselves to be arbitrary.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: I think we can all agree that society is facing a lot of problems right now. Everywhere you turn, you're likely to see evidence of error in thinking, delusions that are hurting people, and a cloud of confusion and uncertainty around things that may have seemed sure and certain until five minutes ago or recently.
And the realm of science, I think, is no exception. Welcome to Idea of the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I get to continue my conversation with Jay Bujichefsky, a professor of government, philosophy and civic leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. Internationally recognized for his work on natural law, self deception, happiness, and ultimate purpose, he's widely read on the unraveling and possible restoration of our common culture. Among his 20 previous books are what We Can't Not Know, how to Stay Christian in College, and how and How Not To Be Happy. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, First Things, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. Welcome back to the podcast, Jay.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Glad to be back.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Well, for those who haven't listened to the first half of the conversation or watched us on our YouTube channel, let's just briefly recap. Your book. Pandemic of lunacy tackles 30 crazy ideas prevalent in society today. Who did you write this book for? And how do you think this book's going to help us find clarity amidst all the confusion?
[00:02:32] Speaker A: I wrote this book for ordinary people. Now, I make some philosophical arguments, but as I view it, philosophy itself begins with common sense and tries to elevate it. So that shouldn't be an entirely different kind of thing that you're doing.
I want to write in a way that makes sense to ordinary people, helps them reconnect with their own common sense, helps them to have better common sense. There are always some things in. In. In what everybody believes that are true. Like here I am, I am experiencing this right now. I'm talking to you.
Men are different than women. There are always some things in them that is in common sense that can be mistaken and that, that, that. Where we're not quite connecting the dots of all of the things that we know.
So I'm helping people connect those dots. I want to write in such a way not that people could say, well, that's strange. Why would you say that? But where they would say, oh, yeah, I never thought about that before, but that makes sense. Helps me make sense of other things I know. And some of that I think I knew all the time, but I didn't know I knew it. I mean, that would be my hope. I also want to encourage people to not despair when they see the lunacy going around them. Not to have to think the world. Am I crazy for thinking the world is growing crazy? Maybe I'm the one who's crazy. A lot of people worry about that, especially young people. And I want to give them hope
[00:04:03] Speaker B: and along those lines, an invitation not to retreat further and further into themselves or into the things that they choose to, you know, to entertain them and give them safety.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: That.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: That is a danger in itself. And so I love that your book's an invitation to come out, to engage, to join your fellow man and seek that objectivity and that clear thinking.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Come out of the closet.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Come out of the closet. Yeah. I will say that this book is not an intimidating length either. You know, we say 30 chapters, 30 lunases, but each one is very short, very accessible, can be read easily in a single sitting, two or three even. And so they're great. And along those lines, I was going to ask you, was there any thought on the publisher's part or yours in packaging these lunacies, either singly or in small groups where people could consume them in different ways. I don't know if you have an audiobook version of this or, or just some way to kind of consume these lunacies in little chunks besides reading the book?
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Of course, yes, the. You can, you can buy the hardcover. Of course, you can also buy it as a Kindle if. Have the. If you have the app, more than one app can actually read Kindles. But if you like to read electronic books and there, that's nice because if you have bad eyesight like me, you can enlarge the font and it's easier to read. And it's available as an audiobook. I think Amazon, I think they're still doing this. They were offering the audiobook free for people who took out a new subscription to their streaming to their audio service. So that's. And it's the, the, the audiobook is selling like hotcakes. I think the guy who did the voice, who read it did a very fine job. And you know, that's. People are, People are busy. You can read it as you're, as you're driving to, Driving to work. You can, you can sit back with headphones and a cup of coffee at night and listen. That's another way that you could, that it can be packaged for you.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And you sure read it from front to back. But, but even when I was prepping for this interview, I mean, I was going from 1 to 15 to 27, you know, kind of all over, picking the, the ones that were connected to science explicitly so they don't have to be read it read in order.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: I tried to write it in such a way that, that, that would work because I knew that people would do that.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Yeah, you have them in sensible chunks, though, you know, part one through part four. And so let me just quickly continue to review what we covered in our first conversation together.
In part one, we looked at lunacy number nine, which is that scientists, scholars and experts are neutral authorities. Now remind us again the difference, the key difference between objectivity and neutrality and which one is possible for us human beings to strive for.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Neutrality is pretending to others or pretending to yourself that you have no bias at all. Look, you might have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you already. You know that you have a bias. You, hopefully you have a bias toward finding the truth in this conversation.
You have a bias for not being mistaken yourself. You should. Now those biases are what we call objectivity. They're not having no bias, which would be neutrality. That's impossible. If I. Sometimes people say, well, you should be a neutral teacher. Well, if I was neutral, then I'd be neutral about whether I should teach at all. I'd be neutral about whether I should teach this course. I should be neutral as to what to put in the reading list. I'd be neutral about, about whether it matters anyway or how to teach. And of course, I'm Not. But what I should be is objective. I should definitely have a bias. My bias should be in favor of discovering the truth, hopefully being helpful to other people I'm talking to in discovering the truth, and a bias toward fairness. And that should include a commitment toward what are called objective procedures. Things like listening to the opponent, giving him a chance to give you his reasons. Giving, Giving my own reasons, instead of just saying, well, that's what I say, and that's all I say and that, and just, just, just take it. You know, we should, we have to engage each other's arguments, and that's, that's objectivity. It's. I, I like to use, I think I used this in our first session. I might not have. I like to, to use the analogy with baseball. The, the, the rules of baseball are not neutral as to which team wins.
They're designed to give an advantage to skill so that the most skillful team wins, the one that is most adept at using these rules skillfully.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: We also started looking at several lunacies about human nature. In part one, in our first segment, we looked at the lunacy that human nature is merely animal. In your book, you talk about one of your own pets, a cat named Chesterton. He was unfailingly affectionate, and you grieved him when he died. But Chesterton didn't love you and you didn't fault him for this. To love, you write, is to will the true good of the other person. Chesterton had no concept of his true good, much less yours. He grasped the particulars of life, you write, but not the universal concepts that occupy your mind and our minds. Well, why is it important to remember how much we differ from other animals? When we consider our human nature?
[00:09:11] Speaker A: It's profoundly different.
If we were like the animals, if we were like Chesterton. Look, Chesterton was affectionate. I loved him. He was a great cat.
But we can do something that Chesterton could never do.
I could will Chesterton's good. Chesterton couldn't will my good.
I can recognize the greater dignity of persons who are also capable of that of my wife, for instance, my children, my friends, other human beings.
I can engage in this amazing thing called love, which requires a rational being being free, able to make decisions, able to make choices. From the perspective of my faith, I say that this is connected with the fact that we are made in the image of God who has intellect, who knows what he is doing, chooses it freely, and loves.
But whether or not you accept that, you can recognize that these are profound differences between us and the Other creatures. And we don't want to deprecate those differences. We don't want to say, well, we're just, we're just animals. Well, we are animals in the sense that we are embodied beings, of course, but we're not just animals. We are animals with this difference.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Rational animals.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Right, rational animals, yeah.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: Well, lunacy number 18 again in your human nature section tackles the two extremes. Everyone is either evil or everyone is good. People yearn for a simple answer, but the truth is more nuanced. You reject both extremes. What's your answer to that age old question?
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Yeah, well, progressives and utopians, optimists of the extreme varieties, all think, well, human nature is basically good. It's just our culture, our conditioning, our social class, our education, something else that's made us bad. And if we just fix that, then everybody will be right. Well, you know, you try to fix that and people don't all become right.
And so then you start bearing down and the next thing you know, there's the gulag, you're putting people in prison camps.
On the other hand, there are people who think, who think human nature is just plain evil.
If it was just plain evil, we wouldn't even be capable of recognizing the bad condition that we're in. We wouldn't be able to be capable of recognizing our sin at all.
The fact is that we are neither simply good nor simply evil, but we are created, good and broken, fallen.
We are not just beautiful, but we are a beauty that is in ruins. That is, we are not just something sparkling, but something sparkling that is smeared with mud.
I sometimes use the example of we're not artifacts, like an automobile, but the analogy will work here. Take a Rolls Royce automobile. It's a wonderful car, it's designed well, and so on and so forth. So you can say its design is good. But on the other hand, you have a particular Rolls Royce vehicle and it's got all kinds of leaks in its cooling system and other problems.
And the rubber on the tires is all worn away. It's not going to be safe to drive. So it's designed as something good, but it's in a bad condition.
Now, that's true of human beings too. If we ignore the beauty here, we're missing something dreadfully disastrous to overlook. If we ignore the way that beauty has been marred, we're ignoring something equally disastrous.
And either way can lead into rivers of blood.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Right. And that tyranny that you speak of, well, you're critical of the idea that we can transcend human nature through things like technology, many people today frame that effort as sort of the continuation of evolution. Moving from natural selection to self directed evolution. Is that a coherent way to think about human beings or does it rest on a misunderstanding?
[00:13:32] Speaker A: No, it's not a coherent way to think about human beings. You ask the person who wants to change human nature.
You know, we're talking about people now, the transhumanist. They, they, they want to, they, they don't just want to make us live forever, to make graft chimpanzee genes into our for, into us for stronger muscles and things like that. They want to change how our minds work. They want to change how we evaluate things. They want to change the moral basis for being a human being. Now tell me if you're going to change, by what morals, by what system of morals could you decide to change somebody's morals?
If you're saying everything is up for grabs, we're going to redesign people. And so among the things that you're throwing out in this redesign is the inbuilt basis of our judgments of good and evil. Like it's good to take care of my children. Then what do you have left to make any decisions at all about good and evil? As CS Lewis pointed out when he wrote his great book about this, the Abolition of Man in the last Century, he said there's nothing, ultimately there's nothing left except the felt impulse of the redesigner. At the moment, you just don't know what you're doing. So what really ends up happening is that the people who want to redesign us are going to be redesigning it in the interest of their own power.
And it is significant that the militaries, the industrial establishments, the other organizations, the governments of a number of countries, including our own, but certainly not only our own, are investigating things like this. How would you like soldiers that never had to sleep?
How would you like soldiers who never felt guilty doing anything whatsoever and unquestionably just had no conscience and unquestionably did whatever their commanding officers told them to do, Even if it was by the military, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Illegal.
You wouldn't want that, I hope. But some people say, what general could resist this? It's going to happen. It's going to happen.
This is what they mean by self, by self directed evolution. Somebody is getting his way. Somebody is going to be the designer. Somebody else is going to be the designee.
I don't want to be at either end of that.
I want to be what I am.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yeah. Well, Lunacy24 tackles the idea that all that exists is material. A claim that's all too familiar in debates about origins. You write that even to explain what matter is, we have to suppose the objective and observable reality of things which aren't matter.
So why is it such a crazy idea to say everything boils down to just matter?
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Consider the statement everything boils down to just matter. Okay, is that, Was that statement matter?
Yeah, sure it was, because I expressed that statement by pushing air out with my diaphragm and making it vibrate against my larynx. And. Okay, was the meaning of the statement matter?
Yeah, because it was just something my brain was doing. You know, you can keep chasing this rabbit down, but ultimately there are some things here going on that aren't. That aren't matter. Even if the brain was representing meaning, there's a difference between the meaning and the representation of the meaning. I can write ink on. I can make marks of ink on paper that say the cat is black.
But, you know, the meaning is the same if instead of putting it in inks on paper, I change the matter of it and do it in pixels on, on, on my display screen. Well, the matter's changed.
So by the, by the everything's material standard, the meaning must have changed. No, the meaning hasn't changed. The meaning is not material. So even to talk about materialism, you're depending on the fact that we're not matter, that we're not exclusively matter, that matter isn't all there is. That's what I meant to say.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and in this chapter, you mentioned Richard Dawkins, a champion materialist and defender of the Darwinian origin of life. You call Dawkins saying that we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes, and yet he follows that with a call to arms to upset those designs of our selfish genes. You say he rails against blind destiny only because he's blindly programmed to rail against it, which is a sort of strange liberation. Is Dawkins caught in a trap of his own making?
[00:18:13] Speaker A: There he is, caught in a trap of his own making. Now, I don't claim that Dawkins believes that he has genes for rebelling against his genes, but he believes that ideas like the idea of rebellion are carried in human beings by these things that he thinks are like genes, and he calls them memes. And he thinks that these are self replicating and selfish and interested and survive or don't survive in certain patterns, just like genes, and that he's programmed by these. So basically, he Says, let's rebel against our genes.
What kind of rebellion is it when you're just acting according to another deterministic program?
I rebel because I am blindly programmed so to rebel. So it's not really a rebellion. This isn't in the interest of freedom.
There's. There's got to be, if anything, that he's saying at all, if even making the argument, I think that this theory about human beings and genetics is true and the other view is false.
Even to say that you have to presuppose that you are free to follow the evidence wherever it leads and not just programmed by your prior predispositions.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Are we determined or do we have that free will?
There's a lot of folks who subscribe to a Darwinian view of life that are certainly torn there.
Now, you end that chapter with a really nice rational argument for the soul that doesn't depend on just faith or biblical revelation. You describe the rational human soul as patterns of activity in which a living body participates. And then you say, since some of the actions of the rational soul do not depend on union with its body, perhaps they don't stop when the body stops. I thought that was pretty profound. How does your view that we are unions of body and soul help to refute the claims of materialism?
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Well, this is a very ancient argument. It goes back to. It goes back to Thomas Aquinas.
He borrowed from a pagan philosopher, Aristotle, the idea that the soul is the form of the body, which means the pattern of the embodied human life.
Now, some people think that's in conflict with the Christian idea of the immortal soul. No, it isn't.
This is a very elementary definition of a soul. So that you could say a tomato plant has an embodied life, and the form of that embodied life is the tomato plant soul.
When we say that only human beings have a soul, what we really mean is that we think that only human beings have an immortal soul.
So what I'm addressing is not the question, do we have a soul? Yeah, your life has a pattern. Of course you have a soul. What I'm addressing is the question, is it immortal?
If it is the pattern of an embodied human life, then when that body is destroyed, can the pattern persist?
Thomas Aquinas had held, yes, it can, because some of the things contained in that pattern are not themselves brought about by any bodily organization.
My ability to speak to you about this question and to discuss the question of whether whether we are immortal, whether we are souls, you know, whether we have bodies, this is not something that any bodily organ Produces for me my bodily organ.
I can smell a smell.
I can see an image.
But, you know, you don't smell like. Like a being with a soul.
What would that smell like?
There is no sensory apparatus that can do this for us. This is something that our mind is doing, if you like, our soul is doing, our living, our activity of life is doing, which can't be explained entirely in terms of the body. Thomas Aquinas reasoned that therefore, if it's not something that if it patterns the body but it isn't produced by the body, it is at least reasonable to think that it could perhaps survive the destruction of the body.
Now, he went further than that and said it's not just reasonable to think it, but he thought that it did survive on the basis of his faith. But before that point, just to say that it looks like there's something here that can survive, that's straight philosophical argumentation. I think it's pretty darn good.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: And speaking of the soul, your last set of lunacies in Pandemic of Lunacy relates to delusions about God and religion. These lunacies all seem to point to the claim that truth about God is unknowable, oppressive, or even irrelevant. But you point out that an attack on religious truth is an attack on all truth. Tell us how these lunacies undermine science and the pursuit of truth.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: Yes, I wouldn't want to be misunderstood here. Suppose that somebody would. I wouldn't say that somebody in ancient Greece who attacked beliefs about Zeus was undermining all truth.
But Zeus was just a created. Well, they. They didn't have the concept of creation. But he was just a created being, if he existed at all. He was just a being among other beings, a very powerful one in this universe. And he was like a Marvel Comics superhero writ large.
When we say God today, we don't mean that. What we mean is the first cause who.
Who. Without whom nothing else would exist, nothing else would, would have come into being with the possibility of making sense on whom therefore, all sense depends.
So if you're saying that there is no God, what you're saying is, is that the really creepy ancient Greek idea was true, that everything comes out of chaos, that ultimately, ultimately nothing makes sense. We play on our lyres, we sing songs to the gods, we go to war. We have our families, we do this, we do that. But this is all stuff. Like the scum floating on the surface of a pond. Underneath is just blackness and chaos. That's what you're saying. Now, people have not necessarily caught up with that. Implication of their premises, but it's there waiting for them. And that's one of the reasons why the mid 20th century existentialists went nuts. Because they'd figured it out.
They didn't believe that there was a God and that meant that the things didn't have essences and stuff just happens and I have to make it up as I go along and where do I go then?
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
Which comes back to that idea in your book where you say people are logical. Yes, but they're logical slowly. Takes time to catch up with some of these things.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, circling back to the issue of tolerance as we wrap up today, which is something we discussed in part one, one of your most striking points is that we've come to see judging truth as intolerant. How did we get to a place where making truth claims is seen as morally suspect? And how do we get past that?
[00:25:19] Speaker A: I think that the main reason that we got to that point, There are some other reasons. There are minor reasons.
Ethical theory had fallen into disorder already. But the biggest reason that we want to believe that making any judgments about truth is intolerant is because we don't want people judging us. A lot of us have bad conscience.
And if you can say, well, you know, you can't make judgments about truth anyway, who really knows?
Who are you to tell me? If I can keep you from accusing me, then maybe I can keep. I think I can keep my conscience from accusing me.
It's really unreasonable. We ought to be grateful to people who offer judgments to us sometimes. Let's say that I judge that the tuna salad is poisoned.
Bacteria have been growing and at the last three diners got sick. And I say, don't eat that stuff. I've been seeing people regurgitating all over the dining hall. And you say, who are you to make a judgment? Come on man, get off my back.
It should be the same thing when we talk about the big ticket items like what is right and wrong and what is and, and, and who is God? And questions like this. But we are self protective. We don't. We. On the one hand, there's a longing for truth and the deepest truth within each one of us. It's very strong. But there's also a very strong inclination not to know the truth when it's inconvenient for us, when it would mean, for example, that we might have to change.
So, so how do we, how do we get back from that? We have to be honest with ourselves chiefly.
And how can we help others get back from that, well, when somebody says to me, you know, you can't make any judgments, I'll say, oh, do you judge that to be the case?
Now, some people think that that's just a glib response.
Well, maybe it's glib in the sense that it rolls easily off the tongue, but it's not glib in the sense that it isn't making a valid point. If he really believes you can't make judgments, he can't make any judgments, including the judgment that making judgments can't be done.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: Right.
And let's not even mention getting behind the wheel of a car and all the judgments it takes to go from point A to B.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: People, you people often when they say, well, don't be judgy, they'll say, oh, oh, look, I know I can make judgments about the.
If I'm a scientist about the surf, the temperature on the surface of the sun, I know I can make a judgment about whether it's safe to cross the street right now, but I just can't make judgments about. About whether it would be wrong to clone human beings or, you know, who knows, who knows? Well, in some ways these are bigger matters and we even have inside knowledge of them. I don't have inside knowledge of the temperature on the surface of the sun, but I have a conscience. I have some inside knowledge.
I have a design. I have some inside knowledge that have bearing on these moral questions and these questions about God. So why should it be harder to make judgments about those things?
Shouldn't it maybe be easier or more imperative on us to try to do it, even if it is difficult? I think so, yeah.
[00:28:30] Speaker B: So the question is not that we don't judge, but that we judge rightly.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: That we judge rightly. That's right. People sometimes, relativists who wear Christian garments sometimes throw at me. But Jesus said, don't judge. No, what he actually said, what he actually said then was he was criticizing hypocritical judgment. And in another place he says, judge with right judgment. So I'm not saying anything that's contrary to the teachings of the Christian faith or contrary to Judaism. This has always been recognized. It's only in our relativistic times that we tried to bend all these ancient sources of wisdom into the shapes of our devising so that we can get ourselves off the hook when we do wrong or when we're being very silly.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: Yeah, and I love the point that we, we should take it as a good thing when we have the opportunity to correct errors in our thinking. Yes, you know, well, obviously we want that judging to be done rightly to us, and rightly so. But you're saying we should, we should be thankful for those opportunities.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: Sure, sure. I, in class, I allow my students to criticize me and say, your judgment is wrong, Professor.
I tell them it's ridiculous to say we can't judge, but say, go ahead and say my judgment is wrong. Your judgment is contrary to that. Just give me your reasoning.
That's what tolerance really demands. It isn't not judging, it's being patient with the other person, listening to his reasons for these things.
And then you may decide, yeah, I still think he's wrong. All right. I want to teach around, teach well enough so that my students have a fighting chance of finding out if my thinking is wrong and distorted in any way.
But I'm not going to pretend that I'm not making any judgments.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: Yeah, well, one of the things your book can really help readers understand is that quite often the scientific debate over origins ultimately comes down to deeper assumptions about truth, reason, and what counts as knowledge.
What's your closing advice to our audience today about how to navigate scientific debates over evolution, design and origins?
[00:30:42] Speaker A: Well, I think one, one very important thing is to not just read one side and not to assume that people who are telling you, oh, this is what those people believe. Not to assume without checking out for yourself that what they're saying is correct. People often describe the opponent in self serving ways.
I came across a new expression the other day. I hadn't heard it before.
I'd known the idea of presenting your opponent's argument in the strongest possible way before you criticize it, give him as much credit as you can, then criticize him so that it's not a straw man argument. Doing that is called an iron man argument. Okay, I'm for iron man arguments. Let's go ahead and do it. But let's expect them to do that with us too and not allow people to use tendentious definitions in order to produce the conclusions that they want. Without evidence. Like Richard Lewontin's argument that science is, it isn't science if it's not materialistic. No, it isn't science if it isn't following the evidence where it leads. And if it leads you to something other than materialism, well, so be it.
If it leads you to design, so be it.
I It's also very helpful to just again, we get, we sometimes our heads will spin because we think, oh, he's an expert saying this. And you know, you get involved in all of that kind of thing. And we don't just pause for a moment and thinking, wait. People say, oh, it's impossible and illogical to make any inference to the possibility of agency in the development of living things, design in the evidence of living things. But we make inferences like that all the time.
The forensic pathologist has to decide whether the body found at the side of the road was struck by a car, was shot with a gun, or whether the guy just died spontaneously and he's going to look at the evidence. I see a bullet hole here. It looks like somebody shot him. That's agency. That's design. In another sense of the term, somebody designed his death.
The archaeologist, when he digs up something from the.
From the ancient ruin, he has to decide, gee, it's kind of funny shape. It's all eroded, it's crumbled. Is this an artifact or is it just a rock? And he has to look at the evidence and he believes he can make an inference.
Why should we somehow put living things and origins off limits to those kinds of arguments and questions and inquiries?
I think it's arbitrary, and I don't think that we should allow ourselves to be arbitrary or allow others to be arbitrary.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah, that's very well put. Well, Jay, thank you for taking the time to unpack some of the key insights of your book with us.
Final question. How does our audience learn more about your work in general, but also get their hands on a copy of the book?
[00:33:29] Speaker A: Okay. They can get the book from any of their favorite booksellers, whether the online booksellers like Amazon, a brick and mortar store, even if they don't have it, will sell it to you about my own work in general. They can look at my website, the Underground. Thomist. Thomist. The word comes from Thomas Aquinas. We know Thomas. Thomas is spelled with a th Tomest is too. So it's T H O m I s t.o r g undergroundthomist.org they can go there and they'll find some of my articles that they can read. They don't have to pay anything. They'll find links to some of my books at online booksellers. They'll find descriptions of these books. They'll find, I have a blog and all kinds of things, some autobiographical stuff because I was ensnared in some of these Luna disease myself when I was younger and all sorts of things.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. And I would encourage folks who are considering this book that, you know, it's something you can consult regularly as you debate and discuss these issues with friends, family, co workers just as they come up. You know, there's 30 different crazy ideas explored and responded to in this book, and it'll be something, a good tool to keep around for a while yet. Well, Jay, thanks again for your time.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: Thanks for letting me talk about Pandemic of Lunacy.
[00:34:44] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, for Idea of the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
